Monday, March 23, 2015, 5:00pm
Warren Weaver Hall, Room 1302

Accelerating the Discovery of Insights from Data

Today, businesses and scientists alike struggle to get to the
value in their data. Their challenges include finding and gaining
access to the data they need, “wrangling” the data into a form
they can use, and setting up the systems and software to be used –
all before even tackling the analysis. With no coordination,
multiple groups may re-do the heavy lifting to ready the data for
use, or struggle to figure out what data is already available.
Further, the skills required to get from raw data to insight span
a broad range from systems to data management, optimization,
statistics, algorithms, story-telling and visualization. Rarely
can you find such multi-disciplinary expertise in one team – it
is typically scattered across multiple business units or
departments. The IBM Research Accelerated Discovery Lab is a unique,
collaborative environment specifically designed to facilitate
complex analytic projects by tackling these challenges. One of the
key elements of the Lab is the notion of a data lake,
accessed through an easy-to-use, collaborative tool called
LabBook, which, together with new practices such as
datastorming, helps bridge the gaps between experts from
different disciplines. We will highlight some successful
applications of these technologies, from diverse fields such as
medical research, food safety, social media analytics and predictive
equipment maintenance.